SEO: How can you improve your Organic Listing Position?

Published By zooboole

Let's not mistake things. The goal of every single website is to have traffic, meaning to have as many as possible people visiting it every single day. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of practices and tools you could use to make that happen and help improve a website's goals. In this post, I will tell you what is SEO and how you can improve yours on Google Search Engine

According to internetlivestats.com, there is more than one(01) billion websites, and every second there are thousands of them being launched.

Internet live stats for instance can actually provide you with a list of all these websites. But imagine the time it could take you to go through them. Or, let's assume you have enough time and you are ready to go through them one by one. Each one has its content type and objectives, how can you easily locate the website that could probably be talking about what you want? The same waste of time.

I prefer not to try that. That's where Search Engines come into the game.

A Search Engine is basically a website that looks for content on other websites all around the world in a very short time. This means, that it doesn't prioritize finding websites but rather content that can fit what you are looking for.

So if you are looking for an apple, it should give you content that are talking of the apple without focusing necessarily on the website that delivers the content. This is pretty cool, but since there are millions of websites, it's very important for Search Engines to sort them every time someone is looking for something that your website has.

Let's try this:

1,410,000,000 results/resources are available for the keyword apple. With such results, the search engine really has to sort and check which one to bring first, second, third, etc. Believe me, it will not be sorted by alphabetical order.

How the search engine could possibly display the result? because there are lots of things it has to consider like:

• How to take out the most accurate information
• How to bring out the most recent information
• How to get an order to display all
• How to format the result on the page where it's going to be displayed also known as Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
• etc

There are lots of things search engines take into consideration to help the user get the most accurate result. So, let's discover how this generally works and what you can do to optimize your website for the best Organic listings in most search engines.

Indexing

Image Source: Wikipedia

Indexing consists of the search engines adding your website, or a page, or many pages of your website to their database system (also called the index). If you just created your website and Google has not visited it yet, you can submit it to them manually, and that is usually easy to do. All you have to do is to go here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url and enter your website URL.

Positioning

The positioning is concerned with where your website appears on the SERP. That is what everyone is really fighting for. At that level, Google is the only one who does justice. Since no one can really tell in which order Google displays the results, it is very important to remain in line with Google's rules.

In order to do that, there are some free tools Google offers that we can use: Google Webmasters tools, Google Analytics, and Google Adsense.

Observation of your website

Google Webmasters Tools

This tool allows you to see how your website performs on Google's search engine. It also gives the state of your website in Google's index. Through that, you will be able to know what is going right or wrong. You can check how many pages are crowed by Google's search engine on your site. You can also know how many and which links are broken, what keywords people typed to get to your website where is your website listed in the SERP what position it occupied with the keyword, etc. So with this tool, you can easily put your website in good health.

Google Analytics

This tool complements the Webmasters Tools but in a better manner because it does a real-time follow-up of your users. With it, you can learn many things like:

• how many people visit your website in a day, week, month, etc,
• how long do they stay on it,
• how many new visitors came,
• how many old users came back,
• what pages did they visit,
• how did they get to your website, is it through social media, search engines, etc?
• and you can even see how many people are currently on your website
• etc.

So with these results, you can easily analyse what your visitors a most likely interested in on your website or what they dislike.

Google Adsense

It will make sense if after all your website gives you some money. That's why I don't want to omit this tool. Many people may not consider this tool in their SEO optimization but I think it's a very important tool.

Adsense normally gives you the current performance of Google ads on your website (if you have Google AdSense). One of the most important things you have to consider in Adsense is the geo-location of your earnings. This should help you improve your content to match the audience. The events, which include, clicks, impressions, and much more can easily be compared to your analytics and webmaster tools to bring out better insights. And there is much more you can get out of Adsense.

There are still many other tools you could use to see and understand what is actually going on with your website and take considerable action toward it. Like checking the weight, the loading time, the sizes of images and scripts of your pages, etc. You can read the The Ultimate Google Algorithm Cheat Sheet of Nail Patel for more hack of Google SEO Technologies.

Optimization of your pages

The optimization of your pages should start from your source code and mainly your HTML tag formatting. Make your HTML code is as semantic as possible.

Consider making your page titles unique and short. Check out this post here for more details and technics

Add meta tags, even though they are not really considered they may be useful to a human being. Google can still display your meta description in the search results.

Your content should be unique and consistent. After all the content is the most important thing, That's what your users are coming for. And if you remember I mentioned something at the beginning like Google searches for content instead of the website itself.

Create a Robots.txt and sitemap for your site. With Google Webmasters Tools you can get this right.

Create clean URLs. Your URLs should be meaningful. Their Hierarchy should match the architecture of your content and the one of your website. In one word let your URLs be RESTful.

Bottom line

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to SEO. I really advise you to stick to Google's prescription on how to optimize your site. Keep an eye on your HTML code and never try Black Hat SEO because it will harm you more than blessing you. Remain as natural as possible and create great content. If you have any questions concerning this article, just add it as a comment below.

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